


from the bottom of the lake

by salvadore



Category: The Arcana (Visual Novel)
Genre: Female Apprentice (The Arcana), Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Relationships, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-21 12:55:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17044139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salvadore/pseuds/salvadore
Summary: Asra has returned from the Lazaret. Nadia aches at the sight of him.





	from the bottom of the lake

**Author's Note:**

  * For [serenbach](https://archiveofourown.org/users/serenbach/gifts).



> Title partially inspired by this asofterworld - [darling it's better](http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=7)
> 
> This ended up more as a Capital H hurt/comfort fic than expected. I hope, nonetheless, that you enjoy it. Happy Yuletide ♥

Summer returns to Vesuvia bringing a heatwave to the battered, plague stricken city. Though Lucio is still confined to bed, he has spent the last three days demanding company in his chambers. The Court of course acquiesced, descending upon the castle with liqueur and poor taste. Partying in the Count’s private chambers despite the hopelessness spreading through streets with the same quickening pace of the Red Plague, growing louder the longer the disease persists. Unrest among their people has begun to grow. When will their faith in the Count dry up, Nadia wonders. Cities have toppled for less.

For the sake of face, Nadia attends the partying on the third night for as long as she can bear. She no longer sees any purpose in time spent trapped with these political vipers. Not when they have nothing left to give but glib comments and theatrics as they wait like vultures for Lucio’s death. Nadia, for her part, had watched with disdain as Lucio called for a cheers to his own health.

The drawn curtains and candlelight made the room suffocating. The demeanor she wore to play hostess was the only cool thing in the room. When the hour reached midnight, she had made her excuses and, for once, Lucio had nothing to say. Though she'd felt his gaze burn at her back as she slipped away.

Outside of Lucio’s wing and heading for her own quarters, Nadia’s mind turns and turns with the usual ill thoughts for her husband that come after time spent with him. Foolhardy, ugly thoughts that ultimately amount to a world where she seizes power after her patience has worn thin. When she can no longer bide time waiting for Lucio to succumb to his illness while Vesuvia suffers. She knows it makes her no better than Consul Valerius.

Sleep will evade her like this.

Desperate for fresh air, Nadia goes to her balcony. It’s too warm to be refreshing, but the air won’t be choked with the scent of Lucio’s candles and incense. Sweat gathers at the nape of her neck. She inhales deeply as her fingers curl in the fabric of her curtains.

She opens her eyes again on the exhale, and she can see the silhouette of a figure already on the balcony. They're illuminated by the light of the full summer moon.

Nadia feels a sense of déjà vu upon her. And she realizes she knows what tableau is awaiting her. She’s foreseen it so many times. Nadia parts the curtains and steps through to greet her visitor.

It's Asra, returned from the Lazaret. Nadia aches at the sight of him.

Leaning his whole weight against the marble cut railing, Asra looks as though the stone is the only thing holding him up. His skin and clothes are red with the sand from the island, and deep tear tracks cut through the dark ash on his cheeks. He's been crying, and for a while Nadia can tell. But his eyes. They hit the middle distance with such a coldness that the most wretched of Lucio’s Court might draw back with apprehension were that gaze turned upon them.

Asra has never looked at her this way. He doesn’t now; he’s staring down something unseen in the room beyond her. But the impact is not lessened. She’s only seen him so bereft -- so vulnerable and without his usual guard of charm and sleight of hand -- in visions. She had so many dreams of him, broken and crying or defiant and vengeful, that had preceded his arrival that when they had met it had been such a surprise to have him smile sweetly at her. For a long time, Nadia had watched him, expecting a manipulation. Unable to put the two Asra’s she knew together. But Asra had never asked favors. He had seemed truly content to cardgames and lingering in conversation with her; content, it seemed, with her friendship. He had come to be a source of joy in her life.

There is no joy to be had in the present state of him. Nor in having her visions come true.

Quickly, she goes to him, propelled by a need to help him -- this magician she’s come to think of as her friend. His fingers tighten on the marble but, he doesn’t stop her from coming close enough to touch.

“Asra, we cannot stand here,” she says, and she carefully touches his wrist. When he doesn’t move she reaches for his elbow. Her voice is quiet but commanding when she says, “This place is not safe from Lucio’s spies.”

She pulls him along gently, glad to find that he still has his feet under him and can follow her under his own power. Having Asra near her rooms after hours is not the scandal it might have been in a Court less clearly corrupt. Tonight, however, she is less concerned with decorum as she is of Lucio’s rage. Before he'd gone, Asra had only been back in the city long enough to pick a fight with Lucio. This was hardly out of the ordinary, and rarely took hardly any time at all for them. But the fight had been worse than usual. Barbs meant to kill rather than wound egos. When Asra had disappeared again in his usual way, Lucio's ire had been such that Nadia was surprised the current party had not begun the moment of Asra's departure.

Nadia brings Asra to her private bath. Her only sanctuary in the castle from the prying eyes and ears of the Court.

The bath is thankfully empty, any servants who may have waited to attend her conspicuously absent. Nadia chooses to be thankful for this, and for less people around to see Asra in such a state.

She’s also thankful the water is still warm, having been prepared and waiting for her departure from Lucio’s chambers.

“We should get you cleaned up,” Nadia says. She hesitates, choosing her words carefully, conscious not address the ash, where he’d been, or what he found out there on that forsaken island. “Change out of your clothes, and I will help you.”

Nadia turns, looking for the silken bathing robes. There’s one laid out for her, but before she can start looking for another she hears the soft sounds of water being displaced. When she turns back, Asra has eased himself into the bath. He sinks into the water, fully clothed, his loose clothing pillowing around him. Asra sits, waiting with his that blank gaze fixed across the room.

Nadia rushes to change into the robe. She takes careful glances at Asra over her shoulder as she changes. She's afraid for him in a way she's never been before. A way he's never looked to need. As though he will disappear entirely if she takes her eyes off him too long.

Or as if he will sink under the water and let it take him.

The tiled, sunken bath is one of the few palace luxuries that Nadia herself would’ve approved of. So much of the palace is unnecessary and ornate from the moat to her husband’s menagerie of creatures -- the vampire eels in particular. But this one room, dedicated to a bath so large her and her sisters could all sit in it and still be comfortable and it’s warmed tile, she’d declared it her own upon arriving to the palace. Since their wedding Lucio hasn’t been allowed in.

It is the safest place in Vesuvia for Asra. If only for tonight.

Nadia sits close to him in the bath. She helps him wash the red ash from his skin, starting with his hands. His knuckles are red and bruised, and his nails chipped and ripped as though he dug into the beach at the Lazaret until he found clay. And then kept going. Carefully, she pursues the red under his nails, in the lines of his hands. As she draws a cloth across his loveline, there is a feeling of reversal, an unnatural symmetry to her looking into his palm. As if she should be telling the fortune-teller his fortune.

Unfortunately the only visions she’s had of his future have come to pass, breaking and wrecking him as they arrived.

She doesn’t tell Asra her thoughts. She holds them on her tongue, balancing there as she says, “We need to get you out of these clothes.”

She undresses him carefully as she washes him. His clean hands come to rest in the water as she parts his shirt and runs the cloth down his neck. There’s grit and red there too, and Nadia can feel his throat move as he swallows. When she runs her thumb over the skin below his ear she imagines she can feel his heartbeat flutter.

It’s quiet with only the sound of the water dripping from her hands and running down Asra's skin. She undressed him as she went until now he is naked before her, clean but for the red swirling on the surface of the water that tries to cling to and stain his skin.

It's so quiet it seems unbreakable.

Her heart flies into her throat when the door bursts open proving that untrue.

Julian appears in the doorway. His chest is heaving as though he’s run there from the dungeons and Nadia subconsciously catalogs which servants would have told him.

Julian appears frozen at the sight of them in the bath; caught between his urgency and the need to remain formal in the presence of the Countess.

“Close the door,” she instructs him. If he knows then soon the whole palace will know. If it doesn’t already. Doctor Devorak is not someone high on the food chain of palace gossip. It’s unlikely a servant went to him directly with news the Magician Asra was seen in Nadia’s private bath. If the party has not ended in Lucio’s chambers, then the whole Court will have heard the news. But if the door is closed, it will keep out the vipers for the time being.

Julian does as he’s told. With the door shut, the room is returned to just the low light of the candles and the moon reflected on the water’s service. It takes a moment, when Julian draws near, for Nadia to see the eye-patch over his right eye. It’s a new addition. Nadia has the passing, horrifying thought that his mentor, Valdemar, may have taken it for an experiment.

Julian's gaze jumps from them to fixed points beyond them, and his cheeks go bright red. Another time, a carefree one perhaps, and Julian would have stood there comically covering his good eye while he blustered and stuttered through why he was there.

But this is now, and Asra is all but catatonic except for the hand that curls over the edge of the marbled floor. An aborted gesture to reach out, perhaps. Nadia is neither naive nor oblivious -- there have been rumors about Asra and Julian’s relationship. She hasn’t seen the affection herself, but as Julian stumbles toward the bath’s edge, it is clearly evident on his face.

“Asra, what happened?” Julian asks. And though Nadia has washed away the tear tracks from Asra’s cheeks, Julian reaches out and runs his thumb where they’d been. Asra turns into the touch, reacting more to Julian than he has since she found him.

“He went to the Lazaret,” Nadia says. Though he hadn’t said, or even told Nadia before he’d gone, she’d know from the moment she saw him. The red hue of the water, the ash on his clothes before, was all the proof one needed.

She can remember her vision so clearly. Asra, frantic but whole and vibrating with energy absent from him now, stumbling from his small ship and onto the Lazaret’s shore. His lips parted on a name as his feet stuck in the sand.

“I went to find --” Asra begins to say, but he chokes.

Nadia’s memory fills in the name. She feels the bottom drop out of her stomach. She hadn’t remembered that detail until today.

Asra begins to cry again. Emotion swelling up in him, and breaking free no matter how hard he digs what remains of his nails in the stone. Or how tightly he squeezes his eyes shut.

“You were right, Julian.” The words sound like they hurt for him to say. Asra holds Julian’s hand to his cheek, turns in so his lips brush Julian’s wrist when he speaks. “The only thing I found out there was death.”

Julian steps into the bath, fully clothed and pure agony on his face. He catches a few tears with his fingers, wiping them away. It’s a futile gesture.

Now that the tears are back, Asra breaks. Unable to stop from sobbing.

Julian forgets Nadia is there in his urgency. His hands run over Asra’s bare skin, frenetic, looking for some touch that might comfort Asra. He seems as out of his depth as Nadia is - in the face of Asra’s vulnerability. Julian and presses kisses to Asra's hair, his temple, his tear stained cheek. Asra's lips. Asra's clasps at Julian's wet clothes as Julian whispers against his skin. Mostly apologies that Nadia only half catches.

Nadia hears the word ‘apprentice.’ Sees Julian’s body seize up. Nadia wonders if Julian is remembering the freckles spread over summer soaked skin. Or that smile, how it made Asra’s pale in comparison.

Nadia had forgotten that before Julian’s apprentice had been there to temper his bedside manner, she’d been there with a kind word and a hand covering Asra’s, letting him know gently when his teasing had gone to far.

Slowly the water cools around them, and Asra calms and goes quiet again. Even with Julian’s touch, Asra retreats into himself again. The tears dry and he sinks in the water while Nadia and Julian get out, making Nadia nervous.

Nadia catches Asra staring at his hands, and she wonders if he’s thinking of his broken loveline, or his lifeline that swept the length of his palm. Nadia is no fortune teller, but if she were to guess she’d say it looked like a lonely eternity spelled out on his skin.

It takes both Nadia and Julian to get Asra from the bath, redressed, and in Nadia's private chambers. Nadia is efficient where Julian is tactile and worshipful. His lips brush Asra’s hair as he lifts a robe up to bring across Asra’s bare shoulders. His fingers catch in tender shapes on Asra’s wrists, his elbows, even once across Asra’s lower lip.

Nadia locks them in, safe for now from the rest of the palace. Just the three of them.

On her bed, Nadia lays on Asra's right, fingernails gently combing through the hair at his brow. Julian on his left, one hand on Asra's wrist as though he is keeping track of Asra’s pulse. Julian’s other hand strays to Asra’s hip, running careful and comforting lines with his thumb over the cut of his hip bones. Between them, Asra just stares up at the canopy of the bed, still but for the rise and fall of his chest. They lay there, waiting for sleep in matching silk robes. Waiting until Asra speaks.

“I want him to pay,” Asra says. “I want Lucio dead.”


End file.
